Daily Beast's War on GOP Women

"Four Senate Republicans did vote aye on Lilly Ledbetter back in 2009. Yep, you guessed it: the 'girls'—Collins, Hutchison, Murkowski, Snowe. Not a single man."

Michael Tomasky sought to disparage the GOP position on "Equal Pay Day"in his column at The Daily Beast Thursday. However, instead of attacking the Republican position he took a sexist path by disparaging the delivery of RNC spokesperson Kirsten Kukowski, and calling the female GOP Senators "the girls."​

And so I almost felt a little sorry for her Tuesday as I watched her performance on Jansing & Co. on MSNBC, hurtling herself into enemy territory, burdened with the task of defending her party’s record and posture on women. Kirsten, I’ve been there. All of us who’ve done television have—those moments when you know you’ve got nothing, so you keep talking and talking, saying nothing, larding your sentences down with “you know”s and “uh”s, wondering if the viewers can see your face turning red, praying that any second now you’ll hear the host say, “Sorry, we’re out of time.”

OK, I don’t feel sorry for her. She made her bed, as they say. Besides which, knowing she was appearing on the liberal cable channel and would surely be asked the obvious question of what the Republican Party’s women-centric policy ideas consisted of, she damn well should have had a better answer than that we should study “corporate best stand...best practices. How are, are some of these large companies going about, um, you know, paying men, paying women? And, and let’s have this conversation and be transparent about the need, um, to close this gender gap, but I think it’s the way the Democrats are going about it and it’s just in a dishonest fashion.”

While Ms. Kukowski does need work on her delivery, Tomasky ignores her points, including the lack of equal pay at the White House. She also pointed out the unintended side effects of the proposed policies. Her point was that what was needed is to examine why the problem occurs in corporate America, and to fix the root of the problem rather than the symptom. She also pointed out that the House has passed legislation that would help women that the Democratic Party-controlled Senate refuses to consider.

Later in the essay Mr. Tomasky points out that four Republican Senators who were women voted in favor of the Lilly Ledbetter act, referring to them disparagingly as the "girls":

Four Senate Republicans did vote aye on Lilly Ledbetter back in 2009. Yep, you guessed it: the “girls”—Collins, Hutchison, Murkowski, Snowe. Not a single man.